Seventeen-year-old "Alicia Flores" topples under the blow of a chair, with blood-or is it stage blood?-streaming
down her forehead. The women wrestlers, whose ages range from teens to late 30s, train long hours to prepare
for the very real violence of the matches, and insist they don't fake their wounds.
the public with it at the precise moment that
Yolanda, a tecnica, or goodie, pounces on her
and drags her up to the bleachers, sending the
spectators there scattering in blissful, scream
ing alarm. Yolanda wins! No, Claudina wins!
No, Yolanda! But wait! The audience screams
in warning again because a new menace has
silently made his entrance: "Black Abyss"
or maybe it's "Satanic Death" or the "White
Skeleton"; it's hard to keep track-has leaped
into the fray and has Yolanda in a ferocious
leg lock. The situation looks hopeless, but no,
here comes the "Last Dragon," out of nowhere,
and he's carrying a chair! And he's whomping
Black Abyss, or maybe the Skeleton, or maybe
Yolanda, on the head with it! Even Claudina
seems to have lost track of who's who: She's
taking a flying leap at her own ally, the loath
some "Picudo." "He is destroyed forever!" the
announcer yells frenetically.
Or almost forever: In lucha libre, no defeat
is ever final.
"What I want to make absolutely clear,"
says Juan Mamani, who fights as a rudo under
the lucha name of "El Gitano" and who runs
the show, "is that it was me who came up
with the idea of the cholitas." Mamani is a tall,
BOLIVIA S WRESTLERS 117